Recipes for lockdown: Thai fish cakes

If you have some leftover red curry paste from my last lockdown recipe, then this is a great way to use it up.

Thai fishcakes are one of my favourite Thai snacks. I often make them as a canapé or starter for an Asian themed meal, because they are incredibly easy, but deceptively so – people are always very impressed that I have made them from scratch. I prepare the mix ahead of time and shallow fry them till golden on the outside, but not cooked through, then finish them in the oven when I am ready to serve. Less faff and means I can actually talk to my guests.

The fish cake recipe is based on David Thompson’s, but with a few of the more exotic, hard to find ingredients replaced with things you can easily get in your local supermarket. If you can’t get fresh kaffir lime leaves, don’t substitute for dried, just skip them or use zest of lime instead. Likewise, the original recipe calls for snake beans, but I have never seen them in a shop in London, Asian or otherwise, so I just use fine green beans. 

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Recipes for lockdown: Smoked salmon quesadillas

I did have 3 Sydney restaurant posts lined up to share with you, but given that the whole world is in lockdown, it doesn’t seem relevant nor appropriate to reminisce about the delicious things I ate on my recent holiday in Australia.

I am back in London and confined to my home, except for essential shopping and one outing per day to exercise. I have taken to cycling for my daily dose of fresh air and, as I have paniers, I’ve been collecting my shopping on route. No panic buying, mind, just what I need for the next few days.

Since the rest of the nation seem determined to clear all staples from supermarket shelves, I have had to get a bit creative in the kitchen. I have noted an interesting trend though, which is that exotic fruits, vegetables, meats and fish are still in abundance.

"I feel like the we are eating better in this global pandemic than we normally do" said the M&2V, as we munched on fillet steak with chimmichurri and hasselback potatoes on Sunday night. "Living it up in the crisis."

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Hummus with spiced lamb and pine nuts

The new series I am writing for Borough Market, Box Clever, is encouraging me to be much more adventurous with my packed lunches and how I pack them. Don’t you just love these Indian tiffin tins? I bought them for pretty pictures, but I find I am using them all the time.

I first tried this dish in a little family-run Lebanese restaurant called Emma’s on Liberty in Enmore, Sydney. They called it “traditional houmous” but it was so much better than any hummus I’d tried before. It did make me wonder why I’d been eating the unadorned version my whole life. Never again.

The dish is more often called hummus kawarma or hummus b’lahmeh, both of which mean hummus with lamb, but I am sure there are many other names to match the myriad recipes. There are almost as many versions of this dish throughout the Middle East as there are recipes for hummus. Chopped lamb or minced? Pine nuts or pomegranate seeds? Chunky or smooth? Tahini? Herbs? Spices? It depends who you ask.

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Cheese and Chard Triangles

On Friday I did my second demo at the Natoora shop in Turnham Green. I made loquat chutney, which we served with pappadums and naan bread, and these cheese and chard triangles. They were both very well received; a couple of people even asked if they could buy some, nice!

I deliberated a while over what to call these. In Australia I would have called them ‘pasties’ without a doubt, but in the UK that implies something Cornish and stodgy with a short and lardy pastry. Delicious, but not quite what I mean.

In Australia spinach and cheese pasties are almost as ubiquitous as meat pies. They are usually made with puff pastry and stuffed with spinach and cheddar or ricotta. My cheese and chard triangles are more like Turkish börek, since I use feta, as well as ricotta, and add dill and mint to the mix. I also tend to use filo pastry, though ready-made puff is a great cheat if you are short on time.

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Huevos Cordoniz

Back at Busot it was my turn to cook for the Lippy Witches. I did a spread of a number of things, including a couple of the tapas dishes from MoVida Rustica that I have posted previously – Pinchos and Alcachofas con Jamon. As always, however, the most popular dish was the simplest – Huevos Cordoniz (literally, quail eggs).

When I was 17 I lived in Granada for 3 months. My friend and I found a little bar near where she lived and it became our local. Granada is one of the few places in Spain where you still get free tapas with every wine or beer and Bar Rios on Calle Socrates is one of the few bars in Granada that gives you a choice of what that will be. We went almost every night to fill up before our night out.

The menu at Bar Rios has just 8 items and is very simple – chorizo on a roll, omelette on a roll, lomo on a roll, morcilla on a roll…  but the produce was good quality and all cooked and seasoned perfectly. My favourite was what they called Huevos Cordoniz, a baguette round with a slice of jamon topped with a fried  quail egg. For my English palette – it was like a mini mouthful of bacon and eggs. So simple but so good. I have made it many times since and everyone always loves it.

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